1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to the field of oil leak prevention pertaining to ships that are hard aground. More specifically the prevention of fluid leaking out of a vessel that has had its hull compromised by, for example, an immobile object, such as a rock, debris or iceberg.
2. Related Art
There is a constant danger that any seagoing or waterborne craft may collide with a submerged object and therefore sink. The most famous occurrence of such event was the fate of the USS Titanic when it encountered an iceberg. There are thousands more examples of ships either sinking from contacting some submerged object or of them leaking out all of their liquid cargo, such in the instance of an oil tanker breaching its hull, such as the Exxon Valdez which ran aground onto a reef in Alaska, spilling roughly 11,000,000 of crude oil and causing significant damage to the environment and ecosystem. Without enumerating the damage and cost of these types of accidents it is very easy to see that the toll in lives lost, economic and environment costs can be very high.
Therefore it has been contemplated to solve the problem of a breached hull in many different fashions. These attempts have varied in approaches in the instance that one is preventing fluid from flowing out of the vessel, such as in an oil tanker or whether they are preventing fluid from flowing into the vessel, such as in a non-liquid hauling vessel.
One family of approaches is to apply a patch directly over the breach, the most rudimentary would be to weld steel plates to a ruptured steel hull or there have been attempts to “bandage” the opening with some relatively pliable water proof material until a permanent solution can be reached.
Another set of approaches applicable to a fluid leak is containing the fluid in the water. Since most leaks involve oil or similar substances that are lighter than water and they rise to the surface many approaches take advantage of this phenomenon by using floating booms or barriers to contain the material until it can be removed, by skimming procedures.
Although these approaches have merit and may be used in combination with each other or with different approaches there are situations where the vessel cannot be dislodged from the object of contact or it may be undesirable because it may cause the vessel to sink immediately. In this situation the rock or debris is actually partially sealing the breach.
It is therefore a primary object of this inventive material to prevent hull leakage or water intrusion by sealing the hull to the object of contact.
It is another object of the invention to have a device that is stored near land and made available to a region where a special emergency team is trained to deploy it is response to a ship running hard aground.
It is another object of the inventive material to have a device that is easily stored and deployed on vessels by utilizing existing machinery and equipment typically onboard.